Top higher-education technology news: September 2012

From staff reports

September 7th, 2012

Here are some of the top higher-education technology stories in the September 2012 edition of eCampus News.

Several leading universities have joined the open course movement in what is quickly becoming a campus revolution; for-profit colleges, which include some of the country’s largest online schools, face even more scrutiny; and a popular online video forecasts the end of higher education as we know it: These are among the top stories in the September edition of eCampus News.

Our September edition is now available in digital format on our website. You can browse the full publication here, or click on any of the headlines below to read these highlights:

The movement to offer massive open online courses, or MOOCs, picked up a huge amount of steam this summer as a dozen of the country’s top universities said they would make courses available free of charge on the open online class site Coursera by the beginning of 2013. The announcement was made on the same day that investors—including two campuses—committed millions of dollars to the web-based learning site…

The University of Virginia will make four of its courses available for free on the Coursera platform in 2013 after the campus’s governing board in June cited a lack of web-based courses in its controversial ouster of President Teresa Sullivan. But advocates for online education said the university’s partnership with the for-profit internet learning site Coursersa should be seen as a tepid embrace of nontraditional courses, not as a momentous shift toward a new learning model…

For-profit colleges are failing their students and saddling taxpayers with an enormous bill, a two-year investigation by the Senate education committee’s Democratic staff concluded. The harsh report, released July 30 by the committee’s chairman, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, found that federal taxpayers spent $32 billion on for-profit colleges in 2009-10, while more than half of the students who enrolled in them dropped out without a degree after about four months in 2008-09…

In Bill Sams’ future, only the children of the ultra-wealthy will attend on-campus college courses, the student loan industry will collapse, and Google will build an omniscient online educational system while Apple and Amazon team up to create a learning resource leviathan. And all of that comes to pass by 2020…

Higher-education technology leaders have long called for a shift to more technology-based learning—so what’s stopping the revolution? Results of a recent survey identify limited budgets and outdated infrastructure as the primary obstacles impeding the transition to a new learning model…